The Molecular Machine That Stores Energy as ATP

As a graduate student in Cambridge during the 1940s, Peter Mitchell (1920-92) met Keilin and was much influenced by him. He accepted a faculty position at Edinburgh University in 1955 and stayed until ill- 

Boyer concluded that binding of ATP to ATP synthase is considerably tighter than the binding of ADP and this extra stabilization effectively lowers the energy of bound ATP relative to bound ADP allowing its formation in equilibrium with ADP  

ADP/Enzyme + P ATP/Enzyme + H2O (weak binding) (strong binding) 

In 1978, John E. Walker (1941- ) at Cambridge commenced his structural studies of ATP synthase combining determination of the 

In 1997, Paul D. Boyer, John E. Walker, and Jens C. Skou (1918- ) shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry. Skou, at Aarhus University in Denmark, discovered during the 1950s and 60s the mechanism whereby energy derived from ATP is used to pump Na and K ions across cell membranes. Inside cells there is high K concentration and low Na concentration while the reverse is true in extracellular fluids. Energy is required to keep each of these intra- and extracellular gradients from disappearing. The key enzyme involved in this process, Na /K -ATPase was finally isolated in chemically stable form from cell membranes in 1980. 

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